1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to panoramic imaging.
2. Background Art
A panoramic image has image data over a relatively wide angle of field of view of a scene. Panoramic images are increasingly being used to enrich a user experience in a wide variety of applications. For example, mapping services, terrain rendering services, photosharing services, web sites, and other services or applications are increasingly displaying panoramic images to users.
Creating panoramic images with valid data throughout an image area, however, can be difficult given the wide angle field of view. Obstructions or other undesirable objects may partially occlude a field of view. This is especially likely in certain panoramic images where one or more cameras are used to capture a wide angle field of a view of a scene. For example, to capture street-level imagery, multiple cameras aimed in different directions may be used to capture individual images of a scene. These individual images then are combined to create a panoramic image. Depending upon the particular camera arrangement, certain areas may be obstructed or not of interest. These areas can lead to invalid pixel data being present in a panoramic image. For example, in a situation where cameras are mounted on a moving vehicle to capture high-resolution images of a surrounding street scene, certain portions of the images near the ground may be blocked by a camera part or housing, or the vehicle itself, or may include the portions of vehicle when the vehicle is not of interest compared to the street-level imagery.
Photo editing applications, such as, Adobe Photoshop available from Adobe Systems Inc., allow images to be modified by a user to change pixel data and improve the user experience for a user viewing the modified image. However, these photo editing applications require significant time and effort by a user to manually identify and change invalid pixel data. Such photo editing applications are designed for general use and not equipped to handle a large volume of panoramic images.